Blood and Belonging (32 page)

I ask him why the Ocalan family joined “the struggle.” We were poor, he replies, and the Turks treated us like dirt, that's
why. My brother was smart in school, he always had the best grades, and he figured out that we had to fight. “That's why we are here.” He looks down as he speaks, answers tonelessly and woodenly, suddenly the younger brother who doesn't write the lines, just speaks the ones that his smarter big brother thinks up. He says a lot more, but I switch off and wonder to myself, as I look at him, indolent bandit king at ease, how much nationalism there is in his motivation, how much pure banditry. What seems clear is that for him the ends matter much less than the means. The ends—a free, socialist, feminist Kurdistan—are better left to his brother, to true believers. He is obviously more interested in the means. It is the guns, the AK-47s, that speak for him, that speak
to
him.

Next morning, the guns begin speaking. I am led into the next valley, along a goat track, past sentries and lookouts, to a second training camp, to see a live ammunition practice. Ocalan is not there. The commander is an amusing gray-haired old fox, who sits cross-legged in the middle of his American army tent, with his officers around him, eating a dish of fried mint leaves, mixed with tomato. He orders a brigade to attack a redoubt below, and then sits back to watch the show, inviting me to join him, cross-legged beside him. Behind me, squatting on a slope, are several hundred guerrillas, silently observing us both.

His soldiers are so terribly young, I think, as the attack begins. A rocket-propelled grenade, shoulder-launched from behind a rock below me, spatters harmlessly against the basalt face of the mountain opposite, sending up a plume of shale. I try to keep from starting as the machine guns open up on the white flag flying over the redoubt under fire. Under the cover of this hail of fire, members of the platoon begin sneaking forward, hiding behind rocks, edging forward
on hands and knees, Kalashnikovs or pistols in their hands. The smack and thud of bullets into the dirt around them, the whine of ricochets, the afterblast of more grenades set the enclosed space of the mountain valley echoing. In a minute the leader of the platoon is at the base of the redoubt, and I see him lob a grenade up, see it pause in the air and then explode with a gray and unreal puff of smoke as in the movies. When the leader of the platoon grabs the white flag and then sets fire to the straw-bales inside the redoubt to announce its capture, the massed guerrillas on the hills behind me break into applause and chants of “Apo is our leader! Apo is our leader!”

Later, when their commander has dismissed them at the parade ground, and they are all dancing, in a semicircle, arm over arm, chanting war songs, their Puma-clad feet pounding out a shared rhythm in the dirt, and the dust is rising around their shapeless brown trousers, I find myself struck by a sense of having seen this all before. Was it some footage of a Vietcong camp in the jungles of Vietnam? Was it with Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains? Or was the echo in my mind much older, back to the grainy footage of the mountain guerrillas of China, on Mao's Long March?

I had managed, by climbing to the highest and remotest peaks of Kurdistan, to find a by now nearly forgotten relic of twentieth-century nationalism: the guerrilla army waging a war of so-called national liberation, complete with Marxist texts, the wooden vocabulary I had heard from Milan, the red flags, the fervent communitarianism of this collective dance, and, above all, the abdication of the self before the all-powerful leader. I had supposed that the end of the Cold War had marked the end of all that. But it turned out to be alive and well in the mountains of Kurdistan. In its
anti-feudal, anti-tribal rhetoric, in its feminism, it purports to be modern. Marxism, after all, is a form of modernism. But this is a game with shadows, for what, at the end of the twentieth century, seems more unmodern than a movement still in pursuit of a radiant tomorrow which half of the world is just awakening from as from a nightmare?

As I leave the camp, bound now for Turkey and then for home, two thoughts occur to me. The first is that, between these guerrillas' visions of what a free Kurdistan should look like and Muhyeddin's, there is little ground for compromise or reconciliation. When nationalist visions are in such a degree of contradiction, the usual result is war. Nationalism, as a rhetoric of modernity, has proved no more effective than tribalism in uniting the Kurds. Indeed, nationalism, when viewed from this Kurdish mountaintop, seems like a form of tribalism, and one can only predict that tribal wars over the meaning and direction of the Kurdish struggle will continue for a long time to come.

The second thought—since the PKK is a Turkish movement, directed entirely at the Turkish occupation of the Kurdish homeland in southern Turkey—is that this particular guerrilla movement is influenced by nothing so much as by the style and ferocity of its enemy, the Turkish army. I knew I had seen the weapon in Ocalan's brother's belt somewhere before. It was a Turkish military service revolver. Same arms, same ruthlessness. Nationalist movements and the state security forces that fight them often end up inside the same culture of violence. Enemies sometimes resemble each other as closely as brothers. That was the hypothesis I wanted to test, as I descended from the Kurdish mountain-tops, said my farewells to Behjet and Taha, and recrossed the frontier into Turkey.

WITH THE FERRETS

Feret has an eager and forgettable young face. He wears interrogator's shades and a .38 in his shoulder holster. He is twenty-four years old and he is with Turkish special forces. I ask him what the special forces do. He smiles and says it is against regulations to tell me. But today he is taking me into the mountain villages where the Turkish army are fighting “the terrorists”—his word for the PKK guerrillas. He talks American. “No way the terrorists are gonna win. No way.”

While he is out assembling the escort—an armored car and two Land Rovers full of Turkish soldiers—I tell my Kurdish driver that there is a small rodent, with sharp incisors, which London's East End gangsters are reputed to stick down the trousers of their enemies. My Kurdish driver smiles thinly, says nothing.

Southeastern Turkey is a land of opportunity for young ferrets. The whole area is like Northern Ireland, a vast military camp: the helicopters drone overhead; F–16s on strafing or reconnaissance runs scream over the tops of the Kurdish villages; armored personnel carriers and tanks squat astride every major rural road crossing; in the Kurdish market towns, there is a man with a walkie-talkie in every café. I have been shadowed for days. They lurk behind the pillars of the inner courtyard in the hotel. When I venture out in a car, they are just behind in small white Renaults, with video cameras, recording what I see, whom I speak to.

There are bright shining careers in counterinsurgency to be made here, and there are no obstacles in a clever boy's path: civil liberties are permanently suspended; you can arrest any Kurdish troublemaker you want; none of your superiors cares how you get your information from the bloodied suspects in
the cells. True, there are some local journalists, from a Turkish paper called
Gundem,
who report so-called human-rights abuses. But what's to stop you using your gun on them, too? Eleven journalists have been shot already reporting the dirty war. Another one will hardly be noticed.

Foreign journalists, on the other hand, require special handling. Mind you, they're all hypocrites. Especially the British. They should know that fighting terrorists is a dirty business, but they come here and tell the Turks to be nice to the Kurds. They've got the IRA wanting to tear a large piece out of Great Britain, but they come to Turkey and tell us to grant “autonomy” to the Kurds. Stop the repression? Stop the arrests? It's enough to make any good ferret sick.

But modern security culture is all about good public relations. So the ferret bites his tongue. “You want a good show? That's what we're gonna give you,” he says. After all, Istanbul wants to host the Olympics; Turkey wants acceptance. Hadn't the director of security at the border between Iraq and Turkey said that he wanted to have “human procedures, as you have in Europe”? As everyone knows, Europe's procedures are certainly human. It is good form in the counterinsurgency business to tell the foreigners how civilized and humane you would like to be. Even the ferret ventures a few remarks in this vein. As we rock and bump our way up the mountain tracks, past the army camps, barracks, airfields, and surveillance posts, past Kurdish village women who mask their faces from the ferret, he admits that he wished the government spent a bit more on the roads and a little less on the security. The ferret is surely correct: never have I been in a country that spent more on ferrets.

The convoy finally reaches the Kurdish village they think it is safe for me to see—a hundred poor single-story, flat
roofed adobe houses, straggling up a hillside under the brow of a jagged cliff. On the clifftops, I spot the glint of Turkish binoculars. Down in the village, the women are laying ropes of sheep dung on the rooftops to dry as fuel for their fires. Children, sheep, chickens are careening down the filthy winding tracks between the houses.

I have come to see the village guards, the Kurds who are armed and paid by the Turkish military to provide protection for the village. It is alleged that the guards terrorize their fellow villagers, commit atrocities in neighboring villages, and blame it on the “terrorists.” The ferret knows I've heard these stories, so before I set out, I was shown a thick wad of photographs showing recent atrocities. There were so many pools of blood, so many glassy-eyed dead children beside their mothers, so many old men with small round puncture holes in their necks that I didn't bother to ask the obvious question. Did the “terrorists” do this or the ferrets? No one remembers anymore, or cares. What matters is that terror works. Terror is the coinage of power. Make them fear you, say the terrorists, and the people will not collaborate with the police. Make them fear you, say the police, and they will not collaborate with the terrorists. And so it goes, the logic of escalating ferocity.

As the village children gather around the strange foreigner, a Kurdish man in a smooth silk suit with a machine gun on his back hits about with his fist, knocking the children away. Little boys yelp like beaten dogs and cower behind him. He comes up and shakes my hand: the local village guard commander.

It is never safe here, he says, gesturing at the hilltop behind me. Over that mountain, there is a village full of “them.” Village guards are constantly ambushed on the roads
at night. The schoolteacher has been scared away by the attacks, so none of the children go to school. He lays about him again and strikes a boy close by with the flat of his hand. Kurdish men in poor country people's suits crowd around, their heads down, saying nothing. The ferret is close by, watching behind his interrogator's glasses. A Turkish army cameraman is filming every person I speak to.

I break away up one of the village tracks with the village grocer, a red-faced old man in traditional baggy Kurdish trousers, who whispers furtively as we walk. He is caught between the terrorists and the Turkish army. “If we collaborate with the army, the terrorists try to kill us. If we collaborate with the terrorists”—he makes a gesture toward the ferret, who is gaining on us—“he will kill us.”

“What did he say?” the ferret asks, in a friendly, curious voice, as the convoy escorts me away. “He says the army is doing a great job,” I say. The rest of the way home, through the prison camp that is southern Turkey, the ferret and I are silent.

The ferret is doing Atatürk's work, fighting to keep the unitary state of modern Turkey together. You can't compromise when the very unity of a nation is at stake. There is no price that is not worth paying. Pull the balaclava over your face; put some bullets in the chamber; go out and break some Kurdish doors down in the night. Pull them out of bed. Put a bullet through their brains. Dirty wars are a paradise for ferrets. But they are also a paradise for Apo Ocalan and his brother. Nationalism gives them both a cover for barbarism: one kills collaborators in the name of the liberation struggle; the other kills sympathizers in the name of the security of the nation-state.

What will break this cycle? With enough terror, you can always stop terrorism. But can you stop a people from believing
this place is their homeland? Can you stop people wanting their own state? The Kurds here in Turkey know there is a tiny enclave next door where a Kurd can be a Kurd, and they know what that feels like. You can smile, sing, make a joke in your own language. You can go up to a foreigner and talk to him. There are no consequences to fear in a place you call your own.

This border region between Turkey and Iraq is where I finally learn the human difference between a people who have their own place and a people who do not. On one side, hearts and minds are open. On the other, hearts pound with fear. On the one side, they shout “Allo, Mistair” in greeting. On the other, they shrink from foreign contact for fear of trouble. Statelessness is a state of mind, and it is akin to homelessness. This is what a nationalist understands: a people can become completely human, completely themselves, only when they have a place of their own.

The longing for this is too strong to be stopped by terror. I leave the ferret at his barracks, double back into the mountain passes, elude my security tail, and end up on a mountain road at dusk, my way blocked by a huge flock of sheep. A shepherd comes toward me through the rocky pastures. He is old, burned dark by the sun. He wears two rough, untreated hides sewn together like the armor of a warrior prophet. His eyes are blazing and he strides up to me, pushing his sheep aside with his crook: I ask him where I am, for I have lost my way on these high mountain roads. As if astonished that I should ever have believed anything else, he points to the bare burned hills around us, bathed in silver light, and he says, in a voice that is both soft and sure, “This is Kurdistan.”